Search This Blog

Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Steam on Linux is officially announced

As I wrote in a previous post, gaming on Linux has started becoming the new platform for the gaming industry. As of Jul. 16 2012, this is becoming even more and more reality, as Valve, the company behind Steam, has announced that Steam for Linux is coming.

Steam is used to distribute games and related media online, from small independent developers to larger software houses. Steam also has community features, automated game updates, in-game voice and chat functionality. As of January 2012, there are over 1500 games available through Steam and 40 million active user accounts. The concurrent users peak was 5 million on January 2, 2012.

There is a dedicated team for porting Steam on Linux :

Initially formed in 2011, the Valve Linux team is currently 11 people and growing. Our mission is to investigate open source development with a specific focus on supporting Steam and other Valve products on the Linux platform. The Linux background of our team varies from those who have a deep knowledge of Linux development to those who have just scratched the surface. However, one thing we all share is a great passion for supporting all things Valve on Linux.

In a blogspot with a title "Steam’d Penguins" they have announced their intentions:

The goal of the Steam client project is a fully-featured Steam client running on Ubuntu 12.04. We’ve made good progress this year and now have the Steam client running on Ubuntu with all major features available. We’re still giving attention and effort to minor features but it’s a good experience at the moment. In the near future, we will be setting up an internal beta focusing on the auto-update experience and compatibility testing.

But not just Ubuntu, as Steam Client will eventually support all major Linux distributions. Unleash the gaming penguins !

Comments

Yeah, but something else, quite interesting, happened in parallel: screenshots of Steam featuring applications found their way to the internets. Soon they were taken down - but you can still find them with a quick search. Maybe they're fake. But if they aren't... Could Steam become the de facto "software store" for Win, Macs and Linux?

Eventually this is inevitable! If you watch the video (here : http://goo.gl/WV2Cy ) of EA about gaming on Ubuntu, the Chief Creative Director of EA gaming, said that "customers don't care about the platform, they just want to play the same game everywhere". Just remember Onlive !

Using multiple cores and processors simultaneously to achieve faster compression and decompression rates is possible nowadays with the new generation of multi-core cpu's. Using the following methods to create compressed backups of your files will be less time consuming.